The TV Might Be Off but the Signal Is Still There: Thoughts of a Death Doula

I have spent years learning to sit in static.

In my work with people struggling with suicidality, I learned to sit in the hum of a room where the interference was total and the volume was almost too high to bear. Suicidal ideation is the static—the jamming of the signal. A person can be broadcasting on a frequency of such acute pain that the people around them hear only white noise, mistaking the distortion for the message.

My job was to sit in the crackle and say, "I hear a voice in there and I am not leaving you alone in this. Let's adjust the antenna before we scrap the TV."

My clients taught me the architecture of the edge. I learned the difference between a person who wants to die and a person who wants the pain to stop, though in the moment, those two desires sound identical.

When I moved into the world of burnout, I found another kind of edge. It is a place where vitality isn't lost but rather asked to give more than it has been given back. The signal doesn’t disappear. The image weakens and becomes distorted beneath the interference—buried under exhaustion, obligation, and disappointment. You can keep broadcasting for a long time without realizing how much of yourself you are using to keep the transmission alive.

Then, last year, I got my Death Doula certification, and the work shifted. Clients began to arrive not with static or a waning signal, but with a diagnosis that had already put a date on when the TV was likely to be turned off. They were not choosing the edge; the edge was choosing them.

And I realized, with a jolt of dark humor, that I had spent my entire career training for this, learning how to sit beside people at the edge of the unknown.

The circumstances were different. The question was not.

We often equate consciousness with broadcast. We think we are only real when we are performing, producing, emitting. When the body fails, when the voice cracks, when the eyes close, we assume the transmission has ended. But I have sat with enough people in enough pain to know that is a lie.

The signal is not the picture. The signal is the intention, the presence, the love behind the picture. It is the unbroken frequency of a self that does not need a working receiver to exist.

The suicidal taught me that the signal can be buried beneath interference—shame, trauma, biochemical storms, unbearable pain. Sometimes what the person is saying is simply: Please hear me. Something hurts this badly.

With burnout, the signal doesn't disappear so much as it get buried under its own output. A person can keep functioning, performing, producing, caring for everyone around them, for a long time after they've lost track of themselves entirely. What I learned to listen for underneath all of it was quieter: I don't know how much longer I can keep transmitting.

With the dying, something else is happening to the signal. It is neither buried, nor fading. It is persisting but the machinery that carries it fails. It doesn't ask whether anyone can hear it. It doesn't ask whether the person has strength left to broadcast. The message narrows to something harder: I'm not gone. You just won't be able to hear me anymore.

The signal is present in all three. What changes is the relationship to it: sometimes it is buried, sometimes it is fading, and sometimes the machinery that carries it is being dismantled.

In all of this, I am the witness— offering stillness and a refusal to look away, grateful to share the burden of existential terror.

I watched a TV turn off this week. The metaphor I have spent my career living in became a literal thing in the room, and it held. The signal—that original, unbroken pulse of a life that was lived—is still there. It is passing through us now. It is finding its way to some other receiver, somewhere, in some future room, where another exhausted soul will need to hear that they are not alone.

That is the work. That is the only work. The rest is just arguing over the remote.